She's eight years old the first time she realizes that most people don't imagine how they're going to kill someone whenever they're first introduced. Gorion explains it to her in a careful, slow tone of voice, the same tone he'll later use to explain the Birds and the Bees, the same tone he had used when he had told her that another little girl was going to be living in the keep from now on. She listens to him explain. It's not bad, what she sees, he tells her. Just so long as she knows the difference between seeing how to do something, and actually going and doing it. But it isn't ordinary, and it distresses other people when she talks about it. So she shouldn't. It's something secret about her; something just between her and Gorion, and she nods, and pretends that she's fine.
But inside, she knows. It's the first time she starts to piece together that she's not just 'different' or 'uncommon'. That she's scary.
The scullery maid that she'd explained vital arteries to is quietly dismissed from service at the keep, with no fuss and no more talk, and she's replaced by another girl. She's heavy-set, and not very quick, and she thinks it would be very easy to catch her belly on one of the kitchen hooks, and rip her open. It would be only slightly more complicated to weigh her down and flay her open with one of the sharp butcher's knives.
She doesn't mention that to anyone, though. For years, she never mentions it to anyone ever again.
Denial is the first thing she goes through, although she doesn't really realize that's quite what it is at the time. It doesn't seem like denial, because in her head, up top, she knows what's gone on. She's not sure about the specifics of who and why, but she knows that she and Gorion were ambushed on their way from Candlekeep; that their attackers were frighteningly strong; that Gorion had told her to run, and she had, her arm burning from the red-hot spell that had been flung her way, reacting on an instinct that had been nurtured all her life. Gorion is right. Gorion is the strongest, smartest wizard alive. When he tells you to keep out of his way and let him handle something, you do, because he's Gorion. So she'd run fast and hard, until she was far enough away that the fighting was only a distant flicker of lights.
Long hours of careful hiding went by. When it was quiet again, she crept back, her arm hurting and her head swimming with confusion. What was going on? Who were those people? She had planned to ask Gorion when she found him again.
She hadn't expected to find him dead.
Not just dead, either, but… destroyed. There had been an awful, long moment where she'd stood at the mouth of the clearing, staring at scorch-marks and the ruined bits of his robes, the torched remnants of their traveling supplies. The lower parts of his body had been pulverized. Like ground meat, she had thought, staring, because really, that was what it was. There had been the cataloguing, then, the long assessment of death, which she had always engaged in ever since that first distant memory of the rat which one of the cooks had killed outside of the kitchen. The shovel splitting its head from its neck with a messy, bloody thunk.
The devastation of his legs hadn't killed him, she thought. Hadn't happened after he died, either, not with the way the blood had gone, flowing rapidly out thanks to a heart that was still beating at the time. There are scorch marks on his clothes. His chest. His hair is singed; but none of it bad enough to be the killing blow. No, that's the gaping wound through his neck, still wet and glistening dark in the earliest morning light. Someone put a sword through him. Cut his throat and severed his arteries, and left him to bleed out in the hours while she was still crawling her way through the trees.
His face is the only undamaged part of him left. It's blank, and empty, and staring with unseeing eyes up towards the sky. There is nothing of Gorion in there. It's all spilled out into the dirt around him, freeing his soul as the earth soaked it up. It had to have been, Sira detachedly thinks, a painful way to die. An awful, messy way to die. There is the iron scent of blood in the air, and she can feel it pounding through her own veins. Her heart is hot and heavy in her chest. Her fingernails dig grooves into the crinkled leather of her gloves, and the wind whisks through the trees, ruffling a few stray blades of grass and plucking at the tattered remnants of Gorion's clothes.
Gorion is dead.
She has no idea why.
"Life is so hollow," Xan says, the second time they need to go to a temple to have him resurrected. He is lying on the slab, pale but breathing, covered only by a flimsy sheet and the warm light of the sun outside.
The over-used sentiment makes her snort.
"No it's not," she replies. "It's full of messy bits. Blood and organs and bones. You've seen me cut people open, you should know this by now."
He gives her a long look that falls somewhere between despairing and horrified. She reaches over and clasps his narrow shoulder, and smiles. Life is not hollow, she knows; but death would be. At least for her. For her there is no waiting afterlife, no temple resurrection, no kind god's welcome. As much as she deals in death, she knows less of it than anyone else in their blood-soaked band. She wouldn't be here if she did.
"Sometimes your very existence is terrifying to me," he tells her plainly.
Her smile twists.
"I know," she agrees, answering a truth that he didn't even intend with his words.
She never remembers the whole of what Irenicus did to her while she was trapped in that cage.
But she gets a taste of it, again, as she stands in another place and another cage, and feels him drag something out of her while she gasps and searches, thinks, tries to find a way to get out of this mess and kill him. Get past his spells, get to the soft flesh he's left exposed and dig, slash, cut and tear. Rip his throat from his neck with her bare hands. Bash his nose into his skull. Slice through his back and sever his spine. Crush his groin. Snap his neck.
When she fails, and falls, she understands it all at once in the anchor of helplessness riveted to her bones.
She'll never remember, because she'll never want to.
"I feel like I'm turning into this – this monster," Imoen tells her.
There's a pause. Then she looks at her sister, sharp, quick, something like realization flashing in her tired eyes. It passes between them in a moment. I didn't mean it like that, the round 'o' of Imoen's mouth conveys. I didn't mean to imply that you were a monster. And she knows. She knows what it's like, that it's hard, even if she doesn't know what it's like to go from living without it to suddenly living with it; her only ignorance was in the truth of her difference, not the existence of it.
"You're not," she says, the words a little too stiff, her reassuring smile a little too forced. "You managed to live your whole life without giving into it, remember? You can still fight it off. I'll help you."
"I…" Imoen sighs, long and knowing and absolutely exhausted. "I didn't know that it was like this. How do you keep from going insane?"
Too late, she wants to reply, with more bitterness than would be deserved. Her life has been better and longer than many more deserving souls'. Instead of speaking, she leans into her friend-now-sister's shoulder, and pulls a deep breath in through her nose. She feels it fill up her lungs, thinks about all of the puncture wounds that could easily send blood or fluid pouring into them, ruining that carefully constructed respiratory system.
How does she explain this?
"Gorion told me, once, that there's nothing wrong with knowledge or impulses," she tries. Her voice sounds heavy in her own ears. Older. "By themselves they're harmless. We have to choose what to do with them to change that. You already have everything you need to fight it, Imoen. You know what's right and what's wrong, and the difference between what you want to do and what you should do." She shrugs, shoulder bumping shoulder, and feels it as Imoen lets out a long breath.
"I feel like I can't ever let down my guard again," her sister confesses. "Like if I relax, or forget myself, I'll get lost in it."
She doesn't have any advice for that, she knows. For her, this has been a part of her so long that the separation between thought and action, between instinct and emotion, desire and inclination, are so thick and old and impenetrable that she hasn't had to focus on them for years. What can she say? You're right? Don't relax? That's not what Imoen wants to hear. And after everything that's happened, after everything she's been through, she really, really just wants to give her childhood friend some good news for a change.
"Try not to think about it," she offers instead.
They both know it doesn't work like that.
She throws her head back and laughs. Laughs, and laughs, and laughs. Because here is a god asking her if he should be afraid of her. Cyric! Cyric is asking her, the once-skinny-legged girl who used to run around Candlekeep, the scared nobody who watched her guardian be cut down by her unknown brother, the misguided 'hero' who was abducted an tortured by a mad not-quite-elven mage, the wanderer who has been desperate and fighting for every inch of her survival on every step of this road – he is asking her if he should be afraid.
And after all that has been said and done, and after all the cards are laid before them, the only answer she can think of is:
"Yes."
Later on, when she looks back on her life, much of it will seem like a long series of introductions. The milestones become the meetings and the partings, and things are always classified in terms of 'before Gorion died' or 'after I met Khalid and Jaheira'. Before and after Sarevok, and then before and after Sarevok again. After Khalid and Dynaheir died. Before Amelyssan. There are places too, of course, and events, but it is the quality of the people which most accurately represents the quality of her life at any given time.
That's why she can't do it.
There may well be as many partings as introductions in the years to come, but in a god's life, for whatever reason, the trivialities of mortal souls no longer seem so consequential. Gods have subjects and rivals, servants and enemies, but no friends and few adventures. She knows enough to know that she doesn't understand the way they operate, and to suspect that the reverse is more than a little true as well. If she left, even those who retained their affection for her would never again be her equals; and she only likes her superiority in small enough doses to feel smug or cocky every now and then.
What promise could there be in joining their ranks? What would be worth the loss of allies, who have proven so invaluable in all of this? The same allies who have helped her bring a near-god to pieces with only a fraction of her power?
The solar is waiting. Another parting is at hand.
"Take it," she says.
As the solar does, it feels like she is being stripped bare of everything she has. It is like and unlike when Irenicus took her soul. It's the acidic, disinfected burn of medicine poured into an open wound, and the agonizing pull of every hair, tooth, eyelash and fingernail being slowly plucking from her body all at once. The battle-fatigue that had already stolen over her hits twice over, and for a moment all she can feel is panicked regret, horrific denial. For good or ill this power has been part of her, intrinsically, for as long as she has lived. As much as her own soul ever was. She has never thought of herself as a god, but she had never considered how little of her was truly mortal either. There is a scream that tastes of blood in her mouth. It is echoed by shouts of alarm, but a small eternity later, it is done.
She falls like a broken puppet to the ground, armour scraping over stone and weapon dropping from her hands.
In the wake of it, she feels empty. Weak. Her thoughts are jumbled and ill-defined; her instincts are sundered. She inhales, and within the echoing chamber of her own mind, it is the only clear sound.
Something falls into her line of vision, and hands begin to haul her up. The solar speaks. Words sing through the space around them, inconsequential and hollow, and then it is gone. She has no thoughts on how to kill it. When Imoen grabs her, there is no vision of snapping her neck or eviscerating her through the broken edge of her armour. There are no impulses to stymie, and that is terrifying, unwieldy, for even without her soul she had still felt them; felt them even more strongly, in fact. There is a wall but there is no need for it. Guards and gates and protocols suddenly left without purpose. There is a woman held in her sister's arms, but she has no idea who this person is.
When she looks back on her life, much of it will seem like a long series of introductions.
This one is to the mortal being who is left when the Bhaalspawn is no more.
An old woman sits in a tavern, cloaked in traveler's clothes and buried in a darkened corner, and listens to the rumours fly. The place is ramshackle and the beer is thin, the drunks are loud and the door lets in an icy draft. She drinks from a worn wooden tankard, and stares out at the other patrons, and only thinks of ways to kill them when she wants to.
It isn't perfect. But it's what she's earned.